HYPER-Delirious Sudbury
Introduction
You may be asking, what makes a city Hyper-Delirious. Indeterminacy. Zoning is passé. The grouping of like things leads to stagnation, leads to isolation, leads to banality. The ecosystem of a city is ever evolving to achieve a state of balance. It needs diversity not homogeneity, needs micro networks, not large precincts, needs friction not smoothness, and requires inclusiveness, to not breed exclusivity.
Fine-Grain
Hyper Delirious Sudbury does away with the precinct organization of program. Commercial / Retail, Industrial / Employment, Residential, Community Program, Entertainment / Restaurant / Institutional are no longer giant solid coloured areas on a land use map. They are patches of colour woven into an intricate fabric, creating a finer grain to the city. A mixing and folding of program, creates intricate vital networks. A scenario can exist where an individual lives on level eight, works on level three and plays on level five of the same complex. The fine grain allows for increased seams between multiple programs creating opportunities for both symbiotic relationships and moments of friction. Every city needs both of these. Intricate relationships formed between programmatic elements is healthy for both a vibrant city and for economic stability. As Jane Jacob writes in The Death and Life of American Cities, "A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiently complex to sustain city safety, public, contact, and cross-use, needs an enormous diversity of ingredients.' This suggests smallness of programs, intricately woven together forming strong bonds both economically, socially, and spatially. Potentially incongru¬ous uses being assembled in a diverse mixture allow for friction. Friction is the catalyst for vibrancy, forging unique relation¬ships, creating a multiplicity of users and programs in a balanced ecosystem of city life. Hyper-Delirious Sudbury provides the territory for a more inclusionary city, a more tolerant city, a city welcoming multiple demographics of age, race, colour, creed, or class. This diversity is mixed together in the most extreme tossed salad. Diversity breeds understanding, respect, supportive relationships and a string sense of community.
Car-Less not Careless
Hyper-Delirious Sudbury assumes a car-less downtown core. Pedestrians and cyclists are given priority to explore the city freely and at a pace matching the scale of smallness. A unique retailer is much easier to find while walking, rather than at 40km per hour. The existing streets are reclaimed as new forms of linear open space. Cedar Street in the East-West direction and Durham Street in the North-South direction are reinvigorated with a density of tree planting emphasising them as major green corridors in the city. Parking has been pushed to the perimeter of the downtown addressing commut¬ers from the surrounding suburbs. The suburban commuter would park in the perimeter lots, including the event centre lots, typically empty throughout the work week. They would walk through the downtown to their eventual destination, but not before popping into a new hipster café, seeing a dress in the window of a new boutique and running into an old friend from high school. Life is permitted to slow down and the fine grain of the city made apparent while walking. Hyper-Deliri¬ous Sudbury will become a destination. It will become the respite for the suburban dweller. They will want to go to the city, to be active participants in its deliriousness.
Program Disorganization
The car-free core eliminates the requirement for parking. The multitude of parking lots currently in the core serve as the infrastructure for the implementation and the development of Phase 1. All the now vacant parking lots can be filled with a specified concoction of Residential, Commercial I Retail, Institutional, Community Building, Entertainment I Restaurants and of course Open Space. There are no guidelines outlining the assemblage of the ingredients except the amount of each ingredient. The organization of the program is left to the client, the developer, and their consultant team. The amount of each program is critical to keeping the city in equilibrium and insure diversity. There is a significant amount of program dedicated to Residential, both at market rate units as well as subsidized housing. This is an absolute requirement to propel the city of Sudbury into a state of Hyper-Deliriousness. Citizens of Sudbury need to take up residence in the core. Once people begin to live in the core support programs are a necessity.
Linear Park:
The current rail lands are reimagined as a linear park connecting the downtown to a new public amenity along the edge of Ramsey Lake. The linear park will be filled with various active programs. This could include circuit programs such as running, cycling, snow shoeing or cross-country skiing, and blob programs such as hockey, baseball, outdoor yoga classes etc. The linear park will be a hub of activity, re-engaging a derelict piece of land. It will extend the pedestrian and cycling network from the core to a unique natural resource in Ramsey Lake. It offers another opportunity to add a significant amount of contiguous green open space rich in biodiversity. Its planting plan could be as diverse as the city core from which it originates, attracting various species of insects, birds, and other wildlife. The edge of Ramsey Lake is developed as a public waterfront park leveraging the beautiful natural amenity.
Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy is at the core of Hyper-Delirious Sudbury. Outside of a few parameters such as quantity of program, a car-less core and a connective linear park, there is no certainty, there is not predetermined order of assembly related to program. There is no plan. There, it has been stated. There is only a strategy; to create a fine grain of program on each block, to create an intensity of seams along these programs resulting in a robust network of inter-relationships, and providing the territory for social and economic prosperity. It provides the opportunity for moments of friction, where a building corridor is shared by the individual in their bathrobe going out to pick up the morning paper, the office worker getting an early start to the day, and the teenager who has just assisted an older couple with changing a lightbulb before heading out to track practice. The simultaneity of the diversity of life is not divided and separated but in fact are folded into and on top of one another. A sense of community is developed extending beyond your typical social circles of where you live, work and play. An inherent flexibility is built into the strategy. Open floor plates with only a field of columns create an opportunity for new partitions to be created and new programs to be accommodated. Sudbury has gone under immense changes over its history and it will continue to evolve and change.
Conclusions
Hyper-Delirious Sudbury creates an intensity to the city necessary for its rejuvenation. A strategy built for flexibility, an intensity of seams between otherwise disparate programmatic zones, and a network of diversity. It imagines the city as a place of intensity of program at the pace of a pedestrian. It imagines the city not as a broad grouping of precincts, but as an intricate fine grain of program, and a diverse set of users. It is supportive of building parks and built form but more importantly it is focused on building vibrant diverse entangled communities.
(Competitor's text)
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